


concatenate.

by ftwnhgn



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Modern Era, Past Character Death, Prophetic Dreams, Regeneration, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17354108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/pseuds/ftwnhgn
Summary: They both died, then they woke up.





	concatenate.

**Author's Note:**

> Instead of doing anything remotely important I did the sensible thing of listening to the Romeo and Juliet ballet since I used to work on that and got #nostalgia and sitting my ass down to write this little thing in one go. This is sort-of regeneration / fix it / modern au all in one small go for my two favourite gals who are the crossover ship of my dreams. Don't worry, I'll be back to my hamratio drabbles soon enough, but i had the idea on my way home and it wouldn't let me go. 
> 
> The rating is mainly because of the death stuff and all, u know.
> 
> This is unbeta'd and I am not a native speaker, so I apologize for every horrible spelling error or typo y'all will find in this.

_concatenate – (verb) to link together as in a chain. (noun) a series of things depending on or resulting from each other._

___

_"I woke up just in time, now I wake up by your side._  
_My one and only, my lifeline._ "  
\- Taylor Swift, Dress

_*_

She can still feel the taste of it in her mouth, the burning bitterness of the faux poison mixing with the more fatal metallic taste of blood, a deathly combination. How it bubbled up in her throat like wine, as if vines were growing in her lungs to replace all the air she found herself so grasping on to. There has never been a moment she doubted the air in her lungs, the capacity in her chest to store the oxygen that she needed to live. But then she felt it being replaced by those piercing, ever-growing vines, their sharpness spreading down from her mouth and the dagger that tore her body apart to both sides of her chest and eating every bit of air out of her, devouring it the way her love devoured her just days before. When every step felt as light as a feather, her limbs seemed to grow heavier and heavier now like she was made of lead. Maybe she was, who would know for sure, that the sight of her love would have weighed her down to a point of no return. And that was what she was realizing in that moment: that there was no coming back from this.

But she doesn’t want to come back, she thinks, still feeling the lingering traces of the metal splitting open her skin and flesh, of the blood she could feel leaving her body like she could see roses blossoming in the summer. She doesn’t want to come back, now that she is so far away from the heartache. Her lungs breathe freely now, with more air for them than for anything else, with freedom to expand themselves like birds expand their wings upon great journeys.

And is this not the greatest journey?

She opens her eyes, blinking against the sunlight of the cloudless sky above her. All she can see is its never-ending blue, stretching out above her the way the sea stretches itself between two lands. It seems endless, serene and divine in its presence above her head. When she used to be so fond of the stars and the night, she now can’t help but to relish in the beauty of the daylight, of the burning sun and the light it casts upon the world. Upon everything beneath it, including her.

It lets a laugh rise out of her throat, open and untamed, and then she rises to her feet with a never-known ease. Before this, before she opened her eyes, she has never known such ease, such a restlessness to her bones and her motions. It is like she could dance through this world; oh, how she wants to dance through this world! And so she does, takes a tentative step at first, then twirling herself forward through the field she has awoken in. And once she does, she feels the exhilaration running up from the soles of her feet to her fingertips and beyond. Now, she can still remember the lead in her body, weighing her down like a sunset, but it feels foreign in comparison to the sunrise she suddenly embodies, carries with her while she dances through this spring meadow. There are no hills around her, not even a tree-line, and she finds great solace in the given space, in the wideness of this tamed wilderness. Flowers grow around her, up to her elbows, their edges of the naked skin of her bare arms. And they are nothing like those choking vines who were climbing up inside of her moments ago – a past life, it all seem so far away – they are friendly and tickling, how they move across her skin while she dances.

There are missteps of course, she has not danced on her own often, and sometimes she stumbles, nearly falls over herself or picking herself up off the ground when she does connect with the earth again. But nothing of it shames her or makes her feel bad about herself. She feels bulletproof while she dances, like a bird finally escaping its cage with no turning back anymore. And she doesn’t want to turn back, she doesn’t want to turn back, she only wants to turn herself around and forward. Every wrong step is met with delightful enthusiasm because she has never felt so carefree in all her life, her existence, her being. She has read the holy pages, of course, but this here, this moment just for herself without conforming or belonging to anyone but herself, feels holier than anything else. She is the rose without the rosary, the beads she used to count now the roots of the flowers she steps through, and there is no sage clouding her vision but the clear and clean air of the wilderness, of nature. The only scents she can smell are herself and the flowers, herself and the flowers. She is a rose among the wildflowers, finding her place in this meadow in a way she could never make herself fit before this moment.

The drumming thrill of belonging somewhere surges through her and propels her forward, without any pain or exhaustion in her body, until her feet finally find a stop at the edge of this never-ending field, having found its end. It is a cliff, its deep surge downwards right at the edge of her toes, and before her is a beach and then the great expanse of the sea. Nothing but the sea, its calm waters lying before her eyes like a peace treaty she has longed for all her life. It feels monumental, the delight in her bones turning into something that makes her heartbeat pick up and hammer away in her ears. The serenity clings to her movements, to the haze of her mind, but its way follows a longing she can not articulate. She has never felt this before, this current of a deeply-rooted affection coursing her eyes to fly over the blue water and the beach before it, searching for something.

_But for what?_

And then she finds it, seems to find what her heart is yearning for without having imagined it or said a word to describe it. There at the shoreline stands the silhouette of a girl, a woman, as untamed and free as herself, and suddenly all of her exhilaration makes sense. She has danced to get here, to this woman in the sea with the flowers of meadows in her hands. Even in the distance, it paints a clear picture of all her locked wanting coming to the surface. Suddenly, all Juliet could ever love could not look like anything else, could not _be_ anything else.

Their eyes meet and a jolt of never-known but ever-familiar electricity runs through her veins to fill the emptiness her spilled blood left behind. This here, this woman, this is _freedom_ , Juliet thinks, and takes a step forward.

 

*

Ophelia has been awake for an hour now, already up before the dawn as always and getting her time for a jog (or walk, in all honesty), before the city is wakes up and is too full, before returning to the apartment to grab a quick shower and take the newspaper with her into the bedroom. Positioning herself on the window-sill and with her feet propped up on the edge of the mattress, so to not disturb her sleeping girlfriend, and with a cup of tea next to her she spends the next half hour reading through the local stories and then solving the weekly crossword, occasionally taking a sip of her tea or checking for any sign of consciousness coming from the sleeping figure in the bed across from her. But the Danish woman has long given up to try and stir Juliet awake before anything resembling noon, letting the southern blood in her girlfriend win at least one day of the week.

Sundays like this are hardly matched in their serenity, not with the rest of the world hauling itself at them the other six days of the week. Sometimes Ophelia wonders how she has managed to not let it swallow her whole again, to not let herself be dragged down by its claws and teeth, but to stay afloat. It is not love that saved her, not in that bookish sense she used to believe in when she was younger. No, she saved herself, and she knows this. But there is something about having met Juliet and having fallen in love with her, something groundbreaking and earth-shattering in its peacefulness, that made it easier for Ophelia this time around. Whenever the wolfs would claw at her door now, she’d have a retreat she knew she could count on. She has a place to call her own, a home, that is filled with love and understanding and a sanity that can only be found in two people connecting on the most profound level possible and understanding each other completely. She has learned this, too, upon meeting Juliet, and getting to know her, learning her stories and then sharing her own one.

They are the same in that way, in that their past turned them into different people than they were as children. She remembers how she used to walk through the woods and fields of Elsinore, how she found solace in them and the stream connecting them, and how when she thinks back to it there is a treacherous lie weaved into the waterline, something so daringly beautiful that it turned out to be dangerous. She still loves that, the flowers and the trees and the meadows and even the water, but the powerlessness they bestowed upon her is gone and never to be returned to. She has grown from it, from that faithful day men pushed her underwater, and has risen above it. She has grown from a flower to a tree, nurtured by her own strength and recovery and pride than anybody else’s words. There is pride in herself now and a new understanding to her worth that she has not known years ago, and she clings to it in the darker moments in the same way she clings to Juliet at night - a rope in a stormy sea, an anchor in a storm, two hands holding hers steadily through it all. It is all the same and yet it is not, because she is not the same person she used to be, and other things hold importance and weight to her now, deserve her thoughts and her time and her attention now, and they mean so much more than what she chalked up as important in her past.

Gone are the days and nights revolving around a black-clad figure and his ever-solemn vanity, his carelessness. They are replaced now by the golden halo of another woman’s presence, the warmth of fingertips finding their way from Ophelia’s shoulder down to her hands, so fingers can interweave with each other. Subtle looks coming from those keen blue eyes, those north stars that help Ophelia to navigate her life, that can become so dim in the quieter moments that they turn her inside out and give her all but seconds to react and chase that look, to find Juliet and keep her to herself, to share their love between them like spilled secrets, like traded flowers. Roses, she always comes back to this, Juliet is like a dose of roses. And while Ophelia has spent her youth walking through the wildflowers, she now only has eyes for those roses. And she can not get enough of them. She doesn’t think she ever will.

There is something to it, she supposes as she looks up from her crossword to look at Juliet’s sleeping form, about loving a woman when you are one as well. Something so comically familiar and yet so foreign, to discover love in places you thought you already knew so well and decided to love or hate. Ophelia looks at Juliet and there is a bottomless well of emotions overflowing inside of her and she is not sure if it is water or fire that finds its way to climb through the surface. She doesn’t have the right words to describe her feelings except for ‘love’ but even that phrase is not enough. There’s divinity in loving a woman when you are one as well, to love all the similarities and differences, to love this one woman. There is a divinity in loving Juliet, in knowing this love is hers to give and to relish in, and there is relief in its safety. Their love is a safety net, a parachute, a lifeboat. There is nothing she finds more reassurance and peace in, nothing she feels most at home with, most herself. It’s marvelous how something as simple as another person can do that to you, but here they are – Ophelia and Juliet – a pair that could have been shaped by the higher powers themselves.

Not that Ophelia has much to give for such spiritual and biblical thoughts, not the way Juliet does, but she can not imagine this being a coincidence, Juliet entering her life and them interweaving with each other in such a perfect and yet honest way couldn’t have just happened by coincidence.

She feels like she has known Juliet for all her life and _beyond_ that, for forever. There are memories of castles and waterbeds and flowers seared into her mind without ever living through them in her lifetime; and all of those foreign memories only culminate of a feeling of misunderstanding. And then in the middle of them all, like snap shots aligned behind her eyelids, are moments with flowers in her hands, grass beneath her feet and drops of water falling in her hair; and their serenity feels like Juliet. Feels like what is spreading through her bones whenever she is around Juliet. It is like she has already existed once without Juliet but with Juliet around her and it took this lifetime for that feeling inside of her to manifest into something tangible, someone real. If she wouldn’t know better she’d think she dreamed Juliet, made her up of clouds and smoke and the Danish waves, too; out of all the good things she has ever known and the etherealness of the air around her.

Ophelia loves her so much, sometimes it makes her heart beat out of her chest with the thrill of loving someone like Juliet and being loved in return. She will never take for granted how lucky she is, how lucky they are for having this. Both of them have thought for their lives to be like this, have gone through the brimstone and the fire for a second chance at living. And they were granted something to make it worth it in return. Something they would never trade for anything else or hand in.

They are a team. They have each other and the other’s back and they are a team. And that trust even goes beyond love.

The sunshine paints patterns on the sheets (white and gray stripes turning a pale yellow) and on Juliet’s skin where it’s peaking through the pillows and the duvet and Ophelia remains captivated by the simple beauty of this moment. She has seen it a hundred, a thousand times before even, and yet she will never tire of this sight, since it is only meant for her. When she thought about all the good things she used to know finding a fix-point in someone real and tangible this is the closest thing to the image in her head. This utter peacefulness she never thought she’d have a chance with, always so wild and feral in her own way, now being the center of her life. And when she closes her eyes or when they apart this picture echoes through her mind in place of old memories, so she carries all that love and peace around with herself to calm herself down.

Juliet _is_ her fix-point. In the restlessness of sleepless night, she is the headlights Ophelia tails to find her way back home. When there aren’t picturesque memories of Juliet to tie her over and to hold on to, there is her voice like a shore across the deep blue sea, like the Danish coast or Verona’s San Pietro to guide Ophelia back to where she belongs, where she is most herself.

And she constantly asks herself how did she get so lucky?

“You’re staring at me,” Juliet speaks up, her voice immediately making Ophelia refocus while warmth spreads through her, happiness.

Ophelia puts the newspaper down and shrugs, “Only for a minute, maybe. Upmost. Nothing more, I swear,” she replies, a smile filling her face despite the exaggerated fear in her voice.

Juliet rolls over then, the shirt she is sleeping in riding up her arms, so the sleeves are bunched up around her shoulders. Ophelia’s eyes follow the motion before finding Juliet’s again.

“You swear?” she replies, vividly amused if the wicked smile on her face is anything to go by.

Ophelia lifts her hand, two fingers held up, and says, “Scout’s honour.”

Juliet snorts in return, completely delighted by her girlfriend’s usual antics, and the action makes Ophelia feel even warmer than before. There is nothing better than making Juliet laugh like this, so genuine and free, just between the two of them. Said girlfriend leans over the bed to the nightstand to get her glasses to put them on before getting her phone to look through the messages and mails that trailed in while she was asleep. It’s a well-practiced morning routine, done so often that Ophelia doesn’t even bat an eye anymore, and instead takes her own phone to snap a picture of the scene, just for herself to remember those little moments too. Most of them are just for them, but she felt like capturing this one. Juliet, the epitome of light in that moment, and nothing more real than that unfiltered, just awake version of her. It’s for Ophelia to see, only, and that makes it all even better. Even more meaningful.

Waking up besides Juliet is a gift she couldn’t weight in gold if she tried – it is just not enough to measure how much it means to Ophelia. How much she cherishes those quiet and minuscule moments and what they carry with them.

“Did you just take a photo of me?” Juliet asks then, making Ophelia drift back to the present.

The phone is still in her hand and she looks down to it and then back to Juliet, a sheepish shrug following the one she did only minutes ago. “Yeah?”

“You’re suck a dork,” Juliet just replies fondly, shaking her head a little and then going back to read something on her phone. Probably some news story or a message from her cousin that picked up from their phone call the day before. Then she looks up again, blue eyes catching Ophelia’s still transfixed gaze. “You’re going to come over, so we can be lazy together or is the window-sill so much more interesting?”

It does not take more than seconds before Ophelia nods and gets into motion, gathering her mug in one hand and the newspaper, her pen and her phone in the other and then breaching the small distance between the window and the bed to get her feet beneath the sheets and her back against the headboard, Juliet immediately coming in close after watching the whole spectacle. One arm gets thrown around Ophelia’s torso and Juliet uses the other to prop herself up on her elbow to continue looking at her phone, her feet tangle with Ophelia’s, and Ophelia puts one arm around Juliet’s shoulders in return, putting the paper with the crossword section on her legs and using her free hand to grab her pen again. Even this is as much routine as it is loved, them positioned in the closest and most comfortable manner while going about their business, just being beside each other being enough.

“I’ve saved the foreign politics section for you,” she says in between finding an eight-letter word for ‘ _lover_ ’ based in the French language and filling the gaps in. Her hand’s tangled in Juliet’s hair, running through the strands in a display of well-known and much-allowed intimacy.

Juliet hums in return and puts her phone down to reach over Ophelia to take the set-aside pages, putting them onto her stomach before leaning over and kissing Ophelia. “Thanks. You’re the best.”

“I know,” Ophelia replies and earns a smack to her elbow for that – but also another kiss.

It’s received with a hum of her own and the hand that has her pen dangling between thumb and index finger settles on Juliet’s cheek for a moment to draw her in closer. This here, _this_ _woman_ , Ophelia thinks while they share slow kisses and the hand on her hips holds her where she is, so she dares not to move away form Juliet (she wouldn’t), this is her place in this world. This is the closest thing to freedom.

And it feels like arriving home every time their lips meet, every time they look at each other, every time they touch each other. It is like they have known each other beyond any sense of time, beyond this world; like they have never _known_ anybody else or how to _love_ anybody else. The serenity of the thought runs like an electric current through them and Ophelia can’t think of anybody else she is meant to be with, can't think of anybody else but Juliet. It could only ever be her. No one else.

This is it. She kisses Juliet’s mouth, then her cheek, then her neck, and knows: _this is it_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Loving women is the greatest thing to happen to me.
> 
> (for reference i guess: i picture juliet along the lines of lily evans / taylor swift and ophelia as zendaya always.)
> 
> Thank you you for reading and you can leave a comment if you want, I love to be yelled at. Or chat with me on tumblr (moonmccoy) where I share hamlet memes and lose my shit over taylor swift, it’s always a thrill.
> 
> friendly reminder: you are loved, you are enough and you will achieve great things. you are right just the way you are, a living and breathing thing. keep going.


End file.
